Leveraging the cloud to facilitate a digital nomad existence

It was definitely not my express intent to jump on the cloud computing bandwagon. Although I’ve long made my living in the tech world (I’ve been a web site/app developer since 2001), I’m not anywhere near an early adopter of technology, and never have been. I don’t like gadgets, I don’t use my smartphone all that much, I don’t use a tablet, or any wearable. I don’t need a “smart” car or fridge or “smart” anything, really (except computer, phone, and kids).

That said, as my wife and I got serious, around last spring, about setting out on our permanent nomad lifestyle, I started to realize that I was *already* living much of my day-to-day work-life in the cloud, to a degree where transitioning to a cloud-enabled nomadic life, creating value every day from my “6-Sq-Ft Office,” didn’t require much transition at all.

Today, I can comfortably say that if I dropped my MacBook Pro into the ocean (or, more likely, if my toddler pushed it off the kitchen table), I wouldn’t lose a single byte of important data. And the only work-time I would lose would be the time it takes to find a new laptop (and/or wrestle my wife’s away from her) and an hour or so to get oriented on it. Same with my smartphone.

Again — this was never directly my intention. It mostly just kind of happened, over the last five years or so. But it’s a valuable work set-up, particularly for a digital nomad, and so I think it’s worth sharing with anybody also contemplating any degree of location-independence.

Note that I don’t feel like this makes me necessarily anomalous, or particularly ingenious. It’s pretty common for people like me (and, probably, you) to do much of our day-to-day work online, and it’s not much of a stretch to cloudify the remaining odds and ends to finish your transition to a fully-cloudified work life.

BIG disclaimer: it’s not all rainbows and puppy dogs. There are legit privacy and security trade-offs here, and depending on your line of work, it may or may not make sense for you to embrace my approach. A full grappling with these trade-offs lies outside the scope of this blog entry. Your mileage may vary, I’m not a lawyer, fine print, fine print.

But, if you’re tempted to emulate some of this, here are some tidbits on how I manage my day-to-day work in the cloud.

Admin Stuff

For almost all of the “meta” work that I do (admin stuff), cloudification was pretty easy:

• I use Google Drive and Drive Stream for all documents (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.). Not only does this facilitate collaborating with colleagues and clients (in real-time, when appropriate), but it also keeps a synced copy of all my documents in the cloud.
• Note that you can do the same with Microsoft products these days, via their Office365 platform. If you’re into that.
• I use Google Calendar and Contacts (part of G Suite) for obvious purposes — again, all stored and available in the cloud.
• For managing projects, I use Axosoft (a cloud-hosted software dev management product). Completely cloud- and browser-based.
• We now do all our business accounting in Quickbooks Online.
• I use Evernote for all my random note-taking, drafting, free-writing-type work. Evernote syncs to the cloud automatically (and is available offline). Even the free version. All the stuff that I used to dump into text files or stickies or docs on my computer, and/or for short-term throw-away stuff, now goes into Evernote (and the cloud).
• I don’t do much graphics work these days, but I long ago dropped my shrink-wrapped instance of Adobe Photoshop, and now use either PhotoPea or Canva (both web-based) for basic graphics manipulation.
• The vast majority of software applications that I use for business are now web-based. I can count the exceptions on one hand.
• Since I have an Android phone, much of my Google ecosystem footprint syncs automatically. Since I’m also on Google Fi (int’l mobile phone service), setting this all up when I first got the phone was astonishingly (and disconcertingly) easy.

Non-Work Stuff

• All my photos sync straight from my smartphone to Google Photos, without any effort on my part (when on wifi, that is).
• I’m between digital SLRs right now, but back when I had one, I synced all my photos to Flickr. Again, nothing was (exclusively) stored on my local hard drive, so there’s no post-toilet-drop period of mourning for all the photo memories that just went down the toilet.
• As digital nomads, we don’t travel with books. And in spite of the toddler head-count in our household, I still manage to read an (adult) book or two every once in a while. These are Amazon Kindle e-books on my phone. I love paper as much as the next reader, but I also love traveling light.
• CDs? What’s a CD? I’ve been a Spotify subscriber since 2011 (which, yes, permits you to sync content locally for playing offline, and from multiple devices).
• DVDs? What?

Utility-type stuff

A couple other utilities permit rapid uptake on another computer (in those scenarios where I have to jump on another laptop to be productive). The biggest thing, of course, is passwords. Like most contemporary knowledge workers, I use a ton of online user accounts every day, and tracking passwords is not only a security concern and a major hassle, but it also poses the unique challenge of what to do when you try to access all your cloud-based apps and data from a different computer. There’s actually a single solution to ALL of these problems, in the form of a cloud-based password manager.

Like anything else these days, there are a number of competitors in this space, but the one that my wife and I use is LastPass. It securely stores any number of passwords, pin numbers, encryption keys, credit card numbers, etc. And with a browser plug-in (and a mobile app), it can auto-fill these passwords into all the web apps you use every day, allowing you to comfortably use DIFFERENT passwords across your entire cloud footprint, and super-complex ones as well. And, in those instances where you need to hop on your wife’s computer to order up a new MacBook after your toddler pushes yours down the stairs, you can access your password library and be as productive as you were the day before.

I’m telling you, toddlers are CONSTANTLY lurking, scoping out opportunities to break your most expensive/important possessions, in many different, cunning, and convoluted ways. Plan accordingly.

Another tool that facilitates post-toddler-accident recovery is the log-in feature offered by most web browsers. Since I use well over a dozen different web apps every day, my bookmarks and browser settings are key productivity enhancers. I’m pretty embedded into the Google ecosystem, so my preferred web browser is Google Chrome, and when I’m logged into my user profile all my bookmarks, extensions, and settings are stored in the cloud. Such that when I hop onto a different computer, if I choose to log into Chrome on that new computer (which I would do on my wife’s laptop, but would definitely not on a workstation at a public library, for example), my browser environment is configured in a familiar way within a few minutes.

REPEATED DISCLAIMER: I recognize the privacy trade-offs here, and yes I’m uncomfortable with how much of my data I’m exposing to these accountability-free internet giants. I think about this daily, and I don’t mindlessly gobble up each and every new privacy invasion they can think up in Silicon Valley.

So, again, your mileage may vary: please FULLY assess these security/privacy trade-offs as you contemplate the convenience afforded by the cloud.

Work stuff

That leaves my day-to-day work: the (full-stack) code I write to put bread on the table. While there are definitely some cloud-based dev environments, I’m (ironically and sadly) very much embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem on this, which leaves little choice but to leverage a very localized development environment based on the Visual Studio IDE. And while I can (and do) sync my code to cloud-based repositories in a fairly industry-standard way, when you’re the sole developer on a project (all my projects), it’s easy to go several business days between code check-ins. Which leaves valuable work stored on your local hard drive.

Very recently, I made a conscious decision to close this gap, partly to more fully position my work assets in the cloud, but also to lighten the load on my poor, overworked MacBook Pro.

A bit of tedious context required: Although all my web app dev work lives in the Microsoft ecosystem (.NET back-end), I insist on using a Mac as my day-to-day computer (cold dead fingers, and all that). I used to have a Windows (XP, then 7, then 10) virtual machine to do this work, using VMWare Fusion to run the instance locally on my MacBook. Within this VM, I ran the typical dev environment for this stack: Visual Studio, SQL Server Developer Edition, TFS for source control, etc.

However, running two computers locally can really drag resources (processor, RAM, disk space, battery), drives up the cost of the laptop I need for day-to-day work, and also leaves a lot of my work product on my local machine (between code check-ins to the cloud), which puts pressure on the aforementioned toddler/toilet risk.

For these reasons, late last summer, I decided to spool up a cloud workstation, and pivot to using Amazon’s AWS Workspace product for code-writing work. This gives me a Windows 10 workstation, on which I can install my development environment, and have access to it remotely (via standard remote desktop client). The advantages are these:

• My work is now in the cloud, out of reach of those lurking toddlers.
• I can invoke long-running operations (data queries, downloads, etc.), and then just close my laptop and walk away, while the remote operation is still running on the workstation in the cloud.
• I can leave all my development environment apps open and running on that remote machine when I finish a work-session, and pick up later right where I left off, without losing a lot of time and concentration to re-opening various tools and re-ingesting context.
• It has a monster internet pipe (150+ MB up and down). This doesn’t change the size of my local pipe, of course, but it means that when I interact with other cloud apps from this workstation (such as publishing my dev app work to Microsoft’s Azure cloud), it’s mind-numbingly fast.
• In Auto-stop mode, every time the computer is idle for longer than two hours (configurable), it suspends itself, which stops the billing clock. I literally pay less than $20 per month to use this machine about 15–20 hours per week.

The biggest disadvantage is this: the computer is not available to me when I have no internet connection. Also, when my internet connection is weak and/or intermittent, working on that computer can be a drag. But approximately four months into this experiment, I’m pretty sure it’ll stick. The pros outweigh the cons, I think. Mostly because we anticipate steady broadband internet connectivity in our future as far as we can see. We’re not the kind of digital nomads who hunger for remote beaches or mountain-top ski chalets. We’re city people, and although our travel plans extend to most corners of the globe, it’s mainly constrained to urban areas, where we’re likely to encounter internet connectivity of sufficient quality and quantity. Again, your mileage may vary on this, but it’s worth noting that the brute speed of your connection is far less important than its stability. 2 MB (down and up) is plenty, so long as it doesn’t vary wildly from one minute to the next.

As I’ve belabored, leveraging the cloud is not for everyone. But as a digital nomad, I’ve found this degree of business continuity to be quite valuable. If you’re inclined to follow a similar path, I hope these ideas help.

Feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn (Wayne Saucier) if you want to talk through some ideas.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.